Frequently Asked Questions

When does replacing all four at once beat topping up one colour at a time?

When the machine is drifting on several fronts at once — black text greying, colours losing balance, and the test patches all looking tired. One-at-a-time swaps fix the symptom of the week; a full GPR-36 refresh — GPR-36BK, GPR-36C, GPR-36M and GPR-36Y together — resets the whole colour system to the same age, which matters on production work where a proof has to match the run that follows it.

In this family, black and colours are all rated 19,000 pages — what does that matching mean in practice?

It is unusual, and convenient. In many families the black outrates the colours two to one and the slots run on separate clocks. In the GPR-36 family every cartridge is rated at up to 19,000 pages, so a four-cartridge refresh starts four roughly equal countdowns. Your output mix will still separate them — heavy text pulls black ahead, heavy graphics pull colour — but planning stock for this family is simpler than for most.

What does the set cost per cartridge against buying the four singles?

The four singles — the GPR-36BK at $78.02 and the three colours at $71.06 each — total $291.20. This set is $235.74, an average of about $58.94 a cartridge, and saves $55.46 against buying the family one slot at a time. The cartridges are the same ones sold individually; the difference is the bulk price and the single shipment.

Can the four go in across a week, or should the swap be one session?

One session is cleaner if you can spare the machine for it: four fresh cartridges, one calibration, and a test page that tells you the whole system at once. Spreading the swap across a week works too — each cartridge can be changed as its slot demands — but expect the colour balance to shift slightly with each change, and run a test page after each one on proof-critical work.

Who should hold the spare set — and where should it live?

Whoever owns the machine's uptime, stored as close to the machine as the building allows. A set doing its job is the one that gets found at 4 PM on the day a cartridge dies, not the one in a central store three floors away. Keep it sealed, flat, away from heat and sunlight, and date the box on arrival so this set is used before any that follows it.

If one of the four fails early, are the other three still covered?

Yes. Each cartridge in the set is covered individually by our 1-year warranty and 1-year free returns — a faulty GPR-36C goes back on its own and does not drag the healthy GPR-36BK, GPR-36M and GPR-36Y with it. Full terms are on our shipping and returns page, and support runs Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM CST.

About This Set

This is the complete GPR-36 family in one box: compatible GPR-36BK black, GPR-36C cyan, GPR-36M magenta and GPR-36Y yellow cartridges, each rated at up to 19,000 pages. It is the full-refresh option for imageRUNNER production and copy-room machines whose whole colour system has aged together. The set ships from one of our four US warehouses in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Georgia or California, and every cartridge is covered by our 1-year warranty and 1-year free returns. More of the family is on the Canon toner page.

For the other GPR-36 options, there are the black cartridge (GPR-36BK), the yellow cartridge (GPR-36Y), the magenta cartridge (GPR-36M), the cyan cartridge (GPR-36C) and the GPR-36 8-cartridge set. On the machine side, this 4-cartridge set serves the ImageRunner Advance C2020, ImageRunner Advance C2030, ImageRunner Advance C2225 and ImageRunner C2020.